Electronic commerce on the Internet is becoming increasingly popular and many companies and enterprises are migrating towards Internet-based B2B (business to business) procurement for conducting e-business activities. For example, supply chain management e-commerce applications allow integration of participants in a supply chain (e.g., vendors, distributors, resellers customers, etc.) to publish information about their products, prices and availability. Such applications facilitate operational business decisions of the supply chain participants, leading to decreased business operational costs and increased competitive power.
One of the most lucrative and yet challenging types of e-business activity consists of managing and selling spare parts for complex machines and equipment in industries such as heavy equipment manufacturing (e.g., gas turbines). Conventional sales channels for conducting business for spare parts includes publishing paper catalogs containing spare part information that enables customers to determine the spare parts necessary for equipment repair and maintenance. However, conducting sales over non-electronic media is time consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. For critical infrastructure installations such as power generation, conducting business electronically would be cost-effective and afford added convenience for suppliers and customers. For example, e-business would help a supplier with the management and maintenance of spare parts, and help a customer with real-time access to information such as price and availability of required spare parts.
The development of e-commerce applications that support spare parts business activity for complex machines is not trivial. For example, heavy equipment such as gas turbines are very complex structures, and the categories of data related to such machines are very complicated. Moreover, spare parts information for complex machines is typically located across disparate business information systems and data repositories, which makes it difficult to integrate such information. Furthermore, some complex machines such as gas turbines can last for more than 30 years. In such instance, e-business applications that support management and sale of spare parts for complex machines should be flexible and extensible to be able to bridge between legacy documents and new or future electronic data and content sources, to thereby provide comprehensive spare parts information and content needed to support such e-business applications.